It is known in the art to provide a set of large eyelets for lace-up shoes to close the left quarter of the shoe to the right quarter. Certain types of athletic shoes and hiking shoes have large numbers of pairs of eyelets that have interiors that are large enough to loosely receive the shoe lace, thus allowing a quick tightening of the lace without laboriously pulling each section of lace between two eyelets.
Heretofore, large speed lace eyelets have been provided in one uniform size and have been arranged in straight lines down the right and left shoe quarters. While conventional speed laces allow the quick lacing and tightening of the shoe, they permit a quick lacing only in the most common lacing pattern. In the common pattern, each lace half is laced from a left eyelet diagonally upward to a right eyelet in an adjacent eyelet pair, and thereafter from the right eyelet diagonally upward to the left eyelet of the next eyelet pair, and so on to complete the lacing. Often, this common form of lacing does not yield the best fit of the shoe to the foot. However, it alternate lacing schemes are attempted, the speed lacing effect is lost, as the laces bind on each other upon pulling the laces taut from the top of the eyelet pairs.
Another problem in providing straight rows of eyelets in athletic shoes is that they are designed to fit only one standard instep. Persons with feet having high insteps find straight-row speed-laced shoes too constricting when the laces are pulled tightly. Persons with low insteps will find that their conventional shoes are too loose.
There thus exists a need to provide speed lace eyelets which will allow the wearer to use alternate lacing patterns, and there also exists a need to provide a set of speed lacing eyelets which will provide the best fit for feet having either a low instep or a high instep.